Barry J Whyte: Myers, Orwell and free speech

Kevin Myers failed to realise that free speech isn’t an absolute. And though he was fired, he hasn’t been silenced

Blame George Orwell. He’s the one who’s made us all so bloody paranoid.

If Nineteen Eighty-Four hadn’t so pungently sketched out a world where an authoritarian state had an iron grip on the minds of its subjects, if that book hadn’t so terrifyingly drawn out the ramifications of Newspeak, if he hadn’t embedded in all of our minds the idea that language could be the most subtle and insidious weapon of conquest in ...